Because somehow he had to resist what he and Chloe Wheaton might be to each other, he supposed with a heavy sigh. For a decade he’d done his best to stay away; he’d seen the desperation in her eyes; the hunger for the love Virginia had to offer a pair of homeless waifs. So he’d taken her rebuff to heart.
Easy enough to make a holiday of visits to Brighton so Virginia and Eve could enjoy one another’s company. He had even endured a few weeks in London each spring so they could eat ices at Gunter’s and visit Astley’s Amphitheatre and there was no more noble fatherly sacrifice when Darkmere was the finest place to be in the spring.
He suspected Virginia knew why he avoided the Lodge, but she didn’t say a word because she knew as well as he did that it was as impossible for Lord Farenze to do aught but ruin a housekeeper. The polite world would laugh at him and sneer at her if he tried to make anything of Chloe Wheaton but his mistress.
‘There you are,’ Tom Banburgh remarked from the doorway and he welcomed the interruption, didn’t he?
‘There’s no fooling you, is there?’
‘I can go away again until you’re in a better humour if you like, but I thought misery might like some company.’
‘Devil take it, I’m not miserable.’
‘Face like thunder.’
Luke stopped himself pacing up and down like a general before a crucial battle and took the filled glass Tom was holding out to him for the second time today. He took a sip of the finest cognac Virginia always kept for a favoured few and felt a little better after all.
‘I miss her so much, Tom,’ he finally admitted the lesser of two evils.
‘How could you not? I expect Virginia saved you from the tender mercies of your family when she could. She certainly rescued me from my unloving guardian when I was a scrubby boy nobody else cared enough to worry about.’
‘True, and she was always taking in waifs and strays. Seems a shame she couldn’t give Virgil children when she was born to be a mother.’
‘And this remark is coming from a man who would be a mere mister today if she had? You’re either a saint or a liar, my friend.’
‘I’m neither and you know as well as I do a title can’t change the beat of a man’s heart or make him any happier.’
‘I really wouldn’t know,’ Tom said indifferently and Luke reminded himself his friend had been a marquis since he was five years old.
‘Well, I do,’ he argued, ‘and mine hasn’t bought me any great joy.’
‘That’s because you hadn’t much left in you when you acquired it, Luke,’ Tom said sagely.
Luke wondered if anyone else would get away with saying some of the things Mantaigne came out with so blithely without being called out. ‘And you have no memory of being without one, so are necessarily full of fun and laughter, I suppose?’
‘Going a bit far, but I never saw the point in being gloomy. I’ll go on trying to laugh at the world even now, because Virginia wouldn’t want long faces and a grand carry on over her departure from this vale of tears.’
‘True, and we both know she missed my great-uncle as if someone had lopped off an arm or a leg after Virgil died.’
‘Aye, and if there is a heaven at least they’re in it together again.’
‘Since it clearly wouldn’t be so for one without the other, you must be right.’
‘Makes you wonder though, don’t it?’ Tom said.
‘No, love is still a myth for the rest of us.’
Luke gave his friend a long hard look before deciding he was the one obsessed with love and lovers and in danger of tripping over his own tongue. Not that he felt anything like love for Chloe Wheaton.
‘Thing about myths is a lot of people believe them,’ Tom said with a long look at Luke that left him puzzled and fidgety.
Was he being warned not to lightly charm the object of his desires? He could imagine nobody less likely to fall in love with him than aloof and sceptical Mrs Chloe Wheaton. Then he recalled the sight of her disarmed by sleep and a hundred times more vulnerable and wondered all over again.
‘I don’t,’ he muttered half to himself.
‘You could have been cut straight out of the pages of a Gothic tale and pasted into a young girl’s scrapbook of fantasies you look so close to the little darlings’ ideal of a heroic villain.’
‘What nonsense have you been feeding yourself this afternoon, man—a three-decker novel from the yellow press, perhaps? Or are you already three parts cast away?’ Luke asked incredulously.
‘Neither, but you don’t have the faintest idea, do you?’
‘Faintest idea of what?’
‘That your long and dusky locks, brooding frowns and touch-me-not air are sure to drive the débutantes insane with longing at their first sight of you across a crowded ballroom. The moment you stand among a London rout glaring at any boy brave enough to dance with your Eve, the little darlings will start swooning by rote for the lack of space to do it all at once in comfort.’
Luke felt himself pale at the very idea, so no wonder Tom laughed. ‘Why?’ he asked hollowly. ‘I’ll be old enough to be their father.’
‘As are all those dark and brooding villains out of the Gothic novels they devour by the yard, I suppose. Who knows what flights of the imagination such silly chits are capable of dreaming up between them, but you’ll be a prime target for them and their ambitious mamas if you set foot in London without a viscountess at your side.’
‘I wasn’t going to worry about one of those until Eve is safely wed.’
‘Leave Eve to find her husband when she’s ready, man; you owe her that for enduring life with a hermit like you all these years.’
Luke shook his head, but was Mantaigne right? He couldn’t see much attraction in a beetle-browed countenance and raven’s wing black hair he only kept overlong because he had no patience with constant visits from a barber or his new valet’s fussing and primping. When it came to his features, he’d just been relieved Eve had escaped the Winterley Roman nose and put down the occasional appreciative feminine stare as a penchant for his acres and title. Marriage to Pamela Verdoyne had cured him of vanity and he wondered if she’d done him such a great favour if he was about to blunder into the ballrooms of the ton unprepared.
‘I won’t have Eve endure a stepmother like mine,’ he said with a shudder.
‘That’s in your hands,’ Tom said with a shrug.
‘What is this, some sort of conspiracy to marry me off?’
‘That takes more than one person, my lord, and I’m not a matchmaker.’
‘So Virginia, you and my own dear, sweet scheming Eve don’t make a set?’
‘Not through prior agreement, but all three of us can’t be wrong.’
‘Yes, you can—by Heaven you’re more wrong in triplicate than alone.’
Tom merely raised his eyebrows and looked sceptical before calmly helping himself to another glass of cognac.
‘Did Virginia put you up to this?’ Luke asked suspiciously.
‘Don’t you think I’ve a mind of my own and the sense to see what you won’t yourself? If she wasn’t dead, I could strangle that spoilt witch you wed so hastily, Luke; she married you for your expectations, then rejected you for so-called love, as if it was your fault she was born vain, empty-headed and contrary.’
‘I